Thursday, June 30, 2016
Cameos From Zion: Iicky impure infamous iniquitous Ehud Barak of Zio...
Cameos From Zion: Iicky impure infamous iniquitous Ehud Barak of Zio...: Iicky bicky impure infamous iniquitous Ehud Barak of Zion Rather than an indictment of the ruling coalition, Barak’s recent “fire and bri...
13-year-old Israeli girl stabbed to death in her bedroom, Unconscionable Terrorist Attack, Koran and Islamic Terrorism in Zion
13-year-old Israeli girl stabbed to death in her bedroom
Hallel Yaffa Ariel, 13, was killed in her bedroomA13-year-old Israeli girl was stabbed to death in her bedroom yesterday by a Palestinian attacker who scaled a security fence and crept into the family home.
Hallel Yaffe Ariel was murdered while she slept inside her house in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement near Hebron in the occupied West Bank.
The killing of a child rocked Israel and threatens to bring about a new escalation in violence after several weeks of relative calm in the region.
The attack was condemned by governments around the world and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, called it a crime of "bloodlust and inhumanity".
Israeli soldiers set a check point at the entrance of Kryat Arba settlement CREDIT: ABED AL-HASHLAMOUN /EPAThe killer, identified by Palestinian authorities as Mohammad Tra'ayra, a 19-year-old from a nearby village, entered Kiryat Arba early on Thursday and broke into the Ariels' house.
He killed Hallel in her bed and photographs released by the Israeli military showed blood stained across the floor and mattress in the child's room.
“She was stabbed many, many times. Mostly in her back,” said a doctor at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek hospital, where she was treated.
Israeli security guards responded and the attacker managed to stab one of them before Tra'ayra was shot dead. The guard suffered moderate injuries.
Hallel's mother, Rena, said her daughter was on holiday from school and had been sleeping in "like all teenagers on vacation".
"I am a mother, I am not saying anything, I only ask that everyone think about the pain and come to comfort us and give us strength," she said.
Kiryat Arba is an Israeli settlement of around 8,000 people on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Hebron, which has long been a flashpoint for violence.
Around 500 Israeli settlers live inside Hebron under the protection of hundreds of Israeli troops and often clash with the city's Palestinian residents.
Mrs Ariel said the violence would not drive Israeli settlers from the area. "Kiryat Arba is ours and it's still a place you can live in," she said.
Mr Netanyahu promised "strong and determined action" in response.
The entire nation deeply identifies with the family's pain and declares to the murderers: You will not break us.
We will continue to take strong and determined action against terrorism everywhere and at all times.
The entire world needs to condemn this murder just as it condemned the terrorist attacks in Orlando and Brussels.
While Britain considers Kiryat Arba and other settlements to be illegal under international law, the UK's ambassador to Israel, David Quarrey, was quick to condemn the killing.
"There can be no possible justification for murder of a 13-year-old girl in her bed," said Mr Quarrey.
Follow
David Quarrey @DavidQuarreyCondemn today's horrific terrorist attack. Can be no possible justification for murder of 13 year old girl in her bed.
12:46 PM - 30 Jun 2016
7575 Retweets
3939 likes
The US State Department called it an "unconscionable terrorist attack".
Hallel was the first young Israeli child to be killed since a wave of violence began in the region in October.
Over the past eight months, Palestinians have killed 33 Israelis and two visiting Americans in wave of attacks, mainly involving knives but occasionally guns or cars.
Israeli forces have killed at least 198 Palestinians, the majority of whom were shot while trying to carry out attacks, according to the Israeli government.
Several young Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces, including a brother and sister killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in March.
The 19-year-old stabber is not believed to be part of any organised Palestinian faction and, like many of other young attackers, appears to have acted on his own.
He wrote repeatedly on Facebook about his desire to be "a martyr" and shortly before the attack composed a poem eulogising a Palestinian woman who allegedly carried out a car ramming attack at Kiryat Arba.
The killing poses a challenge for Israel's new defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman.
Mr Lieberman is the head of an ultra-nationalist party and promised tough measures against Palestinians militants but the young "lone wolf" attackers leave him with few targets to focus on.
Israeli forces surrounded the attacker's village of Bani Na'im and are likely to demolish his family's home as part of a policy the Israeli government says deters future attacks.
Human rights groups condemn the demolition policy as "collective punishment".
"Destroying the home of the attacker’s relatives and canceling their work permits is an unlawful collective punishment, causing suffering for family members who committed no crime,” said Human Rights Watch.
The killing comes three weeks after two Palestinian gunmen killed four Israelis as they ate dinner at a restaurant in Tel Aviv.
Two weeks after that Israeli troops killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy coming home the swimming pool as they hunted for another group of youths who had been throwing rocks at a motorway.
Thursday 30th June Tel Aviv's White Night Laila Lavan . Largest Party in Zion
Tel Aviv’s White Night – what you need to know
From concerts to parties to road closures, the city that never sleeps prepares for its annual all-night festival.
The Israeli flag displayed on the Tel Aviv Municipality
Thursday night marks the arrival of the Tel Aviv White Night (Laila Lavan) – the biggest cultural event in Israel’s party capital.
This year’s roster of free and low-cost beach concerts and parties, musical, theater and dance performances, special exhibitions and street fairs takes place all through the night from June 30 to July 1 throughout the streets, squares, courtyards and auditoriums of the city.
Additionally, many restaurants, bars and stores remain open all night.
Here is a selection of what to expect:
Free Events
Road Closures
Many streets will be blocked for traffic in light of the events. Israeli police call for visitors to use public transport and park in lots throughout the city.
Beginning at 9 p.m. the following roads will be closed:
This year’s roster of free and low-cost beach concerts and parties, musical, theater and dance performances, special exhibitions and street fairs takes place all through the night from June 30 to July 1 throughout the streets, squares, courtyards and auditoriums of the city.
Additionally, many restaurants, bars and stores remain open all night.
Here is a selection of what to expect:
Free Events
- Street Art Europa – The European Union (sans Britain) is presenting five hours of arts and crafts workshops. Some of the exhibits will be interactive, and there will be a dance party at the end of the night.
Where: 1 Rothschild Boulevard.
When: 8 p.m. –1 a.m. - Concerts at Jaffa - Head over to Jaffa Port and catch a variety of tunes.
Where: Jaffa Port
When: 8:00 p.m. - Radio TLV Silent Disco – Headphone Party.
Where: Rabin Square
When 8:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. - Jazz Orchestra
Where: Sarona complex, Tel Aviv-Yafo
When: 8:30 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.
- Swing Dance Party – Dance classes and swing performances by Holy Land Swing Dance School.
Where: Dizengoff Square
When: 9:00 p.m. – 12:30 a.m.
- 360 A White Night Panorama – Premiere of a panoramic film screened on the front wall of the Cinematheque, followed by all-night screenings, including a Star Wars marathon that starts at midnight.
Where: Cinematheque
When: 9 p.m.
- White/Purple Night – Tribute to Price with concerts and movies.
Where: Ozen Bar, 48 King George Street
When: 10:00 p.m.
Cost: 35 NIS
- White Night Pub Crawl – Free booze and fast-tracked club entrance.
Where: Rothschild Boulevard
When: 9:30 p.m.
Cost: 80 NIS
- Pajama Party – An entire night of family-friendly programming, including activities, music and more. Dress code is pajama chic.
Where: Eretz Israel Museum, 2 Chaim Levanon Street
When: 6:00 p.m.
Cost: 30 NIS
- White Night Rooftop Techno Party
Where: 25 King George Street
When: 10:00 p.m. – 4:00 a.m.
Cost: 20 NIS
Road Closures
Many streets will be blocked for traffic in light of the events. Israeli police call for visitors to use public transport and park in lots throughout the city.
Beginning at 9 p.m. the following roads will be closed:
- Allenby Street – from Ha-Moshavot Square to Herbert Samuel St. in both directions
- Rothschild Boulevard – from Herzl St. to Marmorek St. in both directions
- Herbert Samuel Boardwalk
- Kauffman and Hayarkon Streets – from Yerushalayim Ave. to Shalag St. in borth directions
- Yerushalyim Avenue – from Derech Ben Tzvi to Eilat street, heading northbound
- Tel Aviv Port Area – Rokach Boulevard and Hayarkon St. will be blocked between Ibn Gabirol St. and Sderot Nordau.
- Rabin Square complex - Ibn Gabirol Street will be blocked to traffic from Arlozoroff St. to Sderot Shaul Hamelech in both directions.
- Stage 1: Roads heading westbound off of Ibn Gabirol Street will be blocked to traffic including Nordau Boulevard, Basel, Arlozorov, Frishman, Dizengoff and Marmorek streets
- Stage 2: Roads heading westbound off of Derech Namir and Menachem Begin will be blocked including Rokach Bld, Pinkas, Jabotinsky, Arlozorov, Shaul Hamelech, Kaplan, Carlebach and Harakevet
- Stage 3: Ayalon Highway (Route 20) all interchanges leading into the city will be blocked including Rokach, Hashalom, and La Guardia interchanges.
Presidential Candidates have come and gone each influencing others on the Palestians and Zion
Given the U.S. Presidential Candidates' Views on Palestinians,
The more you listen to the candidates running for U.S. president, the more you understand why the Palestinians have given up on the United States.
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laughs as she meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, September 27, 2012
W hen it comes to Palestinian rights, America’s 44th president is hardly a radical. He has provided Israel with more security assistance than any president in history. He’s refused any dialogue with Hamas, even as Israel reportedly initiates its own. He’s repeatedly stymied Palestinian statehood efforts at the United Nations. But compared to almost all the candidates running to replace him, Barack Obama is a radical. He’s a radical because he admits that Palestinians have any rights at all.
Start with the Republicans.
On the subject of Israel-Palestine, the GOP presidential candidates fall into three overlapping categories: Those who propose keeping Palestinians under Israeli military occupation indefinitely; those who propose expelling Palestinians from Israel; and those who deny that Palestinians exist at all.
In the first category sits Florida senator Marco Rubio, who last May told the Council on Foreign Relations, “I don’t think the conditions exist for” a Palestinian state “today.” Could that have anything to do with the fact that during Benjamin Netanyahu’s time as prime minister between 2009 and 2014, the settler population grew twice as fast as the population inside the Green Line? Not according to Rubio, who last year called Obama’s criticism of settlement building “deplorable” and whose largest funder also helps fund the settlement of Ariel.
Jeb Bush’s view is similar: Palestinian statehood must wait until the Palestinians are represented “by leaders who have the ability to uphold the promise made at the negotiating table –something the Palestinian people do not have right now,” a Bush spokesman said last March.
Ted Cruz is bluntest of all: “Israel is a sovereign nation. And I trust the leaders of Israel to determine whether they want to adopt a one-state solution or a two-state solution.” What the Palestinians want is supremely irrelevant.
These are the moderates. Among the hard-liners is retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, currently in second place in national polls. On a 2014 trip to Israel, he said that while he wasn’t sure if a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “makes a lot of sense,” perhaps “Egypt” might provide “a place for the Palestinians.”
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee agrees. If there must be a Palestinian state, he explained in 2008, “Let them take it out of Egypt. Let’s take it out of Syria. Let ’em take it out of Jordan.” Neither Carson nor Huckabee has explained how he’d get Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Egypt, Syria or Jordan. Luckily for them, Meir Kahane wrote an entire book on the subject.
It’s also unclear how Huckabee would determine which people to transfer to Egypt, Syria or Jordan, given that he’s previously declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” That’s the view of fellow candidate Rick Santorum, too. “All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis,” the former Pennsylvania Senator declared in 2011. “They are not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian.” It evidently hasn’t dawned on Santorum that once you call West Bank Palestinians “Israelis,” you’ve embraced the logic of a binational state.
There is a Republican candidate who once diverged from the Naftali Bennett-esque perspective of his rivals. It’s Rand Paul, who in 2011 proposed eliminating all foreign aid, Israel’s included. But now, after intensively wooing Jewish donors, the Kentucky senator has changed his mind. Today, he supports aid to Israel. It’s aid to the Palestinian Authority he wants to end.
Where does Donald Trump fit in all this? As on most issues, specifics aren’t his strong suit. But this summer he insisted, “I’ve been loyal to Israel from the day I was born.” Trump, it’s worth noting, was born in 1946.
The truly shocking part
But that’s not the shocking part of the 2016 campaign. The shocking part is Hillary Clinton. Obama and Clinton encountered Jews and Israel in very different ways. Before Obama began dealing with AIPAC, he had already forged close bonds to Jews like Newton Minow, who gave him his first legal job; Abner Mikva, who offered him a judicial clerkship; Bettylu Saltzman and Marilyn Katz, who organized the 2002 rally where he denounced the war in Iraq; Arnold Wolf, the rabbi at the synagogue across the street from his house; and David Axelrod, his longtime political consultant.
Having been born to a Kenyan father, having grown up partly in Indonesia, and having had a college roommate from Pakistan, Obama easily grasped the semi-colonial plight of Palestinians who lack citizenship in their own country. And his Chicago Jewish friends didn’t undermine that perspective; they reinforced it. Every one opposed settlement growth. And either loudly or quietly, each broke with the American Jewish establishment over its refusal to criticize Israeli policy in the West Bank. So it’s not surprising that during his pre-presidential years, Obama was, in Wolf’s words, on “the line of Peace Now.”
Hillary Clinton’s introduction was more conventional, and more painful. After saying as First Lady in 1998 that she supported a Palestinian state, which was not yet the official American position, her own husband’s administration disavowed her. Then, the following year, she kissed Suha Arafat after the Palestinian leader’s wife accused Israel of using “poison gas” against Palestinian children, and became the subject of Republican attack ads.
The lesson Hillary learned, and has remembered ever since, is that in American politics, associating yourself with the Palestinian cause never pays. By the time she began campaigning for the Senate in New York in 2000, Hillary had adopted a very different approach to Palestinian statehood. She said that if the Palestinians “unilaterally” declared it, the United States should cut off aid. As a candidate, Hillary also defended Ariel Sharon’s September 2000 visit to the Temple Mount, slammed her husband’s administration for not vetoing a resolution critical of Israel’s response to the violence that followed, pledged to move America’s embassy to Jerusalem and said she was concerned that Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard had been denied “due process.” Most strikingly, during the first weeks of the second intifada, when Israeli soldiers fired 1.3 million bullets, Hillary, in the words of one campaign reporter, did not “earmark a syllable of compassion [even] for the most explicitly blameless of Palestinians” – Palestinian children.
In that Senate campaign, Hillary forged stronger ties to establishment American Jewish groups than Obama did while running in Illinois. And she expressed barely any of his skepticism of Israeli policy. In 2004, candidate Obama said, “The creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this administration in brokering peace.” Hillary, by contrast, declared herself “a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to try to keep those who would do harm to Israel out of Israel.” She never mentioned that most of the barrier isn’t in Israel proper but rather in the West Bank, through which it snakes in order take in as many settlements as possible.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, her aides launched sub rosa attacks on Obama for receiving advice from Bill Clinton’s National Security Council aide Rob Malley and Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, two foreign policy hands distrusted by mainstream Jewish groups. In the words of one well-placed congressional staffer, “every Jewish member [of Congress] knew where AIPAC was” during the 2008 Democratic primary: supporting Hillary.
But all this pales next to what Hillary has done so far in this campaign. In summer 2014, she unofficially launched her presidential bid with a book, “Hard Choices,” about her time as secretary of state. “Hard Choices” is striking both for the way it describes reality and the way it distances Hillary from the policies of the administration she served. Its discussion of Israel begins with the Obama administration’s push for a freeze on settlement growth in 2009, a freeze that Hillary calls “unprecedented.” She admits that this description “caused outrage in Arab countries,” where “people thought I was being too generous toward an offer that was qualified, short term and excluded Jerusalem.” But Hillary then congratulates herself for “telling a hard truth that would cause me trouble.” The implication is that Hillary’s Arab critics just wouldn’t give Israel a break.
But Hillary’s Arab critics were right. It’s not just that the settlement freeze excluded East Jerusalem, which is being severed from the rest of the West Bank by Israeli construction. The “freeze” also exempted buildings on which construction had already begun. This loophole proved crucial, because, as the Israeli press reported at the time, settlers spent the months preceding the freeze feverishly breaking ground on new construction, on which they continued to build during the 10-month freeze, before breaking new ground once it expired. As a result, according to the NGO Peace Now, there was more new settlement construction in 2010 – the year of the freeze – than in 2008. As Hillary’s own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, admitted to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the Obama administration had wanted a freeze that truly stopped settlement growth, but “we failed.”
The real coup
Hillary’s omissions are equally striking when it comes to Gaza. She says that Hamas has “controlled [the Strip] since forcing out its rival Palestinian faction, Fatah, in 2007.” The implication is that Hamas took power in a coup. But Hamas actually won an election. In January 2006, four months after the last settlers left Gaza, Palestinians there, as well as in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, chose representatives to the Palestinian Authority’s parliament. After 10 years of dishonest and authoritarian Fatah rule, a plurality chose Hamas. According to pollster Khalil Shikaki, two-thirds of voters cited either corruption or law and order as their top issue, and 85 percent called the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority corrupt.
After its victory, Hamas called for a national unity government with Fatah “for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied [by Israel] in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.” Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, who had been elected separately the year before, would have remained president. To be sure, Hamas did not recognize Israel, accept past peace agreements or forswear violence. But former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy urged Israel to negotiate a long-term truce with the militant group (something Israel reportedly began doing this year). Israel could also have continued negotiating a two-state deal with Abbas so long as Hamas pledged to accept the outcome of a Palestinian referendum on such a deal, something the group’s leaders later promised to do.
Instead, Bush administration officials pressured Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian parliament and rule by emergency decree. Knowing Hamas would resist Abbas’ efforts to annul the election – especially in Gaza, where it was strong on the ground – the Bushies also began urging Abbas’ former national security adviser, Mohammed Dahlan, to seize power in the Strip by force. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to buy weapons for Dahlan. But when the battle for Gaza began, Hamas won it easily, and brutally.
The real coup, in other words, was not launched by Hamas. It was launched by Fatah and the United States. Instead of acknowledging that decisions in Washington, Tel Aviv and Ramallah helped enable Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, Hillary leaves the reader thinking it was all just the product of Palestinian pathology.
Even more remarkable is Hillary’s near-total omission of any discussion of Israel’s blockade. Because Fatah controlled the West Bank and Hamas controlled Gaza, she writes in her memoir, “Both sides were able to test their approach to governing. The results could be seen every day in Palestinian streets and neighborhoods. In Gaza, Hamas presided over a crumbling enclave of terror and despair. It stockpiled rockets while people fell deeper into poverty. Unemployment ran to nearly 40 percent, and was even higher among young people. Hamas impeded international assistance and the work of humanitarian NGOs and did little to promote sustainable economic growth.”
What Hillary doesn’t mention is that during this “test” of Hamas and Fatah’s “approach to governing,” Israel almost totally shut down Gazan exports to Israel and the West Bank, which had accounted for 85 percent of the Strip’s external market. In the year Hillary’s book was published, according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha, less than one percent as many trucks left Gaza as had before Hamas took over.
Israeli officials justify these measures as necessary for security. And even without the blockade, it’s entirely possible that Hamas would have proved a lousy steward of Gaza’s economy. But to describe Gaza’s descent into “poverty” and “despair” without mentioning the blockade that prevented Gazans from exporting to their biggest markets is wildly dishonest. The implication, once again, is that there is only one true cause of Palestinian suffering: Palestinian depravity.
Embracing Netanyahu
In her book, Hillary also implies that Obama pressured Netanyahu too much. In 2009, in a widely reported encounter, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama, “If you want Israel to take risks, then its leaders must know that the United States is right next to them.” Obama disagreed. “When there is no daylight,” he said, “Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.” In “Hard Choices,” Hillary takes Hoenlein’s side. “I learned,” she writes, “that Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered, but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance you could get something done together.”
So eager is Hillary to prove that Netanyahu responded to her reassurances that she abandons the parameters for a two-state solution her husband famously laid out in 2000. In “Hard Choices,” she mentions that Abbas “said that he could live with an Israeli military deployment in the Jordan Valley for a few years beyond the establishment of a new state,” while Netanyahu “insisted that Israeli troops remain along the border for many decades without a fixed date for withdrawal.” Hillary deems these two perspectives equally valid, and even sees in Bibi’s a glimmer of hope. “I thought that was a potentially significant opening,” she writes. “If the conversation was about years, not decades or months, then perhaps the right mix of international security support and advanced border protection tactics and techniques could bridge the gap.”
What Hillary doesn’t mention is that Abbas’ approach conforms to the Clinton parameters – the very document she elsewhere in the book slams Yasser Arafat for not accepting – which propose that Israel leave the Jordan Valley in three years. Netanyahu’s approach, by contrast, flagrantly contradicts those parameters.
In the year since Hillary released her book, she’s done this again and again: Embraced Netanyahu’s perspective even though it eviscerates her husband's, and Obama’s, vision of a viable Palestinian state. Two months after her book release, in an August 2014 interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hillary noted that “in my meetings with them I got Abbas to about six, seven, eight years on continued IDF presence [in the Jordan Valley] … I got Netanyahu to go from forever to 2025. That’s a negotiation, okay?” Yes, it’s a negotiation. But it’s a negotiation in which Hillary’s strategy of hugging Bibi close, and not making him feel “cornered,” allows him to lead the United States further and further away from an even modestly sovereign Palestinian state.
As the campaign has gone on, in fact, Hillary’s perspective has moved ever closer to Netanyahu’s. “I know what the hard decisions are,” she declared at a campaign stop in Iowa last month. “For the Israelis it is security … For the Palestinians, it is autonomy.” Perhaps Hillary just chose her words poorly. But what Palestinian leaders have been demanding for decades now is emphatically not autonomy; it’s sovereignty. Or, put another way, it’s the individual and national rights that sovereignty might bring. “Autonomy,” by contrast, is what Israeli leaders have periodically offered in lieu of a state. “Would the Palestinian Arabs accept autonomy?” asked Netanyahu in a 1994 Jerusalem Post op-ed entitled “The Alternative is Autonomy." He wrote: “My answer is that they would accept it if they knew Israel wouldn’t give them an independent state.”
In 2009, Netanyahu supposedly reversed this position and declared himself in favor of a Palestinian state. But this year, in a series of statements, he has publicly flipped back and made it clear he doesn’t favor Palestinian sovereignty anytime soon. Is it mere coincidence that now that Netanyahu is back to favoring “autonomy,” and Hillary is courting hawkish Jewish voters and donors, she’s aping his view?
Netanyahu’s current position is that while he still wants a Palestinian state one day, “the dramatic changes that have occurred in the last few years in the region” have made that impossible for the time being. That’s now Hillary’s view, too. In Iowa she declared that, “It is very difficult to figure out how either the Palestinians or the Israelis can put together a deal until they know what is going to happen in Syria, and until they know if Jordan will remain stable.” If that’s really Hillary’s perspective, it constitutes an utter repudiation of the Obama administration’s. And it means that her position is now almost identical to that of Rubio, the man most likely to be her general election opponent, who said last May, “I don’t think the conditions exist for” a Palestinian state “today.”
Hawkish stance
One can defend Hillary’s new point of view. After all, the Middle East is more chaotic than it was during her husband’s administration. Harder to defend is her almost total refusal to publicly acknowledge Palestinian rights and dignity. In her Middle East policy speech at the Brookings Institution two months ago, Hillary mentioned Israel 40 times and the Palestinians not once. She referred to Hamas three times but never mentioned the people of Gaza. The “national security” section of her campaign website mentions Israel five times and the Palestinians none. Even when her website endorses two states, the Palestinians are absent. Hillary, the site promises, will “partner with Israel to advance the two-state vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel with secure and recognized borders.” There’s no reference to working with Palestinians, or fulfilling their aspirations.
Hillary’s response to the rising violence in Israel has been to declare herself “alarmed by the recent wave of attacks against Israelis … Men and women living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere cannot carry groceries or travel to prayer without looking over their shoulder.” Reading the statement, you wouldn’t know a single Palestinian had died.
It’s a far cry from Obama, who in “The Audacity of Hope” affirmed the common, and equal, humanity of both Palestinians and Jews. “Traveling through Israel and the West Bank,” he wrote, “I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost. I flew by helicopter across the line separating the two peoples and found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills.”
When Obama travelled to Israel in 2013, he affirmed Palestinian humanity again. He asked his mostly Jewish Israeli audience to “Put yourself in their [the Palestinians’] shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own. Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day.”
Why won’t Hillary say anything like this? Partly, I suspect, it’s because her overall foreign policy outlook is simply more hawkish. Obama is the first American president with a deep experience of the developing world. He also became an adult after Vietnam, and was thus less scarred by the experience of seeing Democrats lose elections for being too dovish. Hillary, by contrast, had a far more conventional upbringing in a mostly white, middle class suburb of Chicago. While in law school, she worked on the campaign of George McGovern, who denounced the Vietnam War as immoral, and lost 49 states. Then, in her husband’s administration, she became a booster of military force in Bosnia and Kosovo. Israel isn’t the only issue on which she has leaned away from Obama and toward the GOP. In 2002, she backed the Iraq War. Like John McCain, she’s demanding a no-fly zone in Syria now.
The Democratic shift
But the irony of Hillary’s current stance is that while she’s drifting toward Netanyahu, ordinary Democrats are drifting away from him. Between early 2014 and early 2015, according to Gallup, the percentage of Democrats who said they identified more with Israelis than Palestinians dropped 10 points. A Pew Research Center poll last March found that while Republicans have an overwhelmingly favorable opinion of Netanyahu, Democrats view him negatively by a margin of two to one. Among liberal Democrats, who play a disproportionate role in the primary process, it’s three to one.
This shift is part of a larger ideological and cultural change. The Democratic Party, which once had a strong working class white base, is increasingly dominated by minorities, professionals and the secular young, who tend to distrust nationalism, military force and conservative religion, all of which Americans identify with Israel. On almost every domestic issue – from crime to guns to Wall Street to the environment – this new coalition is pushing Hillary to the left. Yet on Israel, so far, it’s giving her a total pass.
That’s partly because most Democrats just don’t care that much about Israel. Except when Americans are dying overseas, voters as a whole – and liberals in particular – mostly focus on the domestic concerns that affect them day-to-day. The Democrats who do care most about Israel, and who have the resources to get a candidates’ ear, are people like Haim Saban, the hawkish billionaire who helps fund Hillary’s campaigns.
But anti-Netanyahu Democrats would care more if they had a presidential candidate who did. Instead, they have Bernie Sanders, who has drawn huge crowds talking about income inequality and financial corruption, but talks as little as possible about the Jewish state. Unlike Hillary, Sanders does acknowledge Palestinian suffering. His website calls on Israel to “end the blockade of Gaza, and cease developing settlements on Palestinian land.” But Sanders gives entire speeches without mentioning anything having to do with foreign policy. Until September, his campaign website didn’t say anything about it at all.
Sanders’ relative silence is something of a mystery. Despite being Jewish and having reportedly spent time early in life on a kibbutz, he doesn’t express much concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And until recently, as an obscure senator from a liberal and not very Jewish state, he didn’t need to. But the consequences of this idiosyncrasy are quite large. If Sanders challenged Hillary on Israel, many liberal activists would back him, thus pressuring her to halt her rightward drift. In a Democratic primary, holding the same position as Marco Rubio isn’t easy to defend. If Sanders made Israel-Palestine an issue, he might at least force Hillary to distinguish herself from the GOP and restate her commitment to a Palestinian state. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe he will.
The harsh truth, therefore, is that the next president will almost certainly care less about the Palestinians than the current one. And when it comes to progress toward basic rights for the millions of people who live without citizenship and the right to vote under Israeli authority today, even this current president has accomplished almost nothing.
Is it any wonder why the Palestinians have given up on the United States?
The more you listen to the candidates running for U.S. president, the more you understand why the Palestinians have given up on the United States.
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laughs as she meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, September 27, 2012
W hen it comes to Palestinian rights, America’s 44th president is hardly a radical. He has provided Israel with more security assistance than any president in history. He’s refused any dialogue with Hamas, even as Israel reportedly initiates its own. He’s repeatedly stymied Palestinian statehood efforts at the United Nations. But compared to almost all the candidates running to replace him, Barack Obama is a radical. He’s a radical because he admits that Palestinians have any rights at all.
Start with the Republicans.
On the subject of Israel-Palestine, the GOP presidential candidates fall into three overlapping categories: Those who propose keeping Palestinians under Israeli military occupation indefinitely; those who propose expelling Palestinians from Israel; and those who deny that Palestinians exist at all.
In the first category sits Florida senator Marco Rubio, who last May told the Council on Foreign Relations, “I don’t think the conditions exist for” a Palestinian state “today.” Could that have anything to do with the fact that during Benjamin Netanyahu’s time as prime minister between 2009 and 2014, the settler population grew twice as fast as the population inside the Green Line? Not according to Rubio, who last year called Obama’s criticism of settlement building “deplorable” and whose largest funder also helps fund the settlement of Ariel.
Jeb Bush’s view is similar: Palestinian statehood must wait until the Palestinians are represented “by leaders who have the ability to uphold the promise made at the negotiating table –something the Palestinian people do not have right now,” a Bush spokesman said last March.
Ted Cruz is bluntest of all: “Israel is a sovereign nation. And I trust the leaders of Israel to determine whether they want to adopt a one-state solution or a two-state solution.” What the Palestinians want is supremely irrelevant.
These are the moderates. Among the hard-liners is retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, currently in second place in national polls. On a 2014 trip to Israel, he said that while he wasn’t sure if a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “makes a lot of sense,” perhaps “Egypt” might provide “a place for the Palestinians.”
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee agrees. If there must be a Palestinian state, he explained in 2008, “Let them take it out of Egypt. Let’s take it out of Syria. Let ’em take it out of Jordan.” Neither Carson nor Huckabee has explained how he’d get Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Egypt, Syria or Jordan. Luckily for them, Meir Kahane wrote an entire book on the subject.
It’s also unclear how Huckabee would determine which people to transfer to Egypt, Syria or Jordan, given that he’s previously declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” That’s the view of fellow candidate Rick Santorum, too. “All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis,” the former Pennsylvania Senator declared in 2011. “They are not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian.” It evidently hasn’t dawned on Santorum that once you call West Bank Palestinians “Israelis,” you’ve embraced the logic of a binational state.
There is a Republican candidate who once diverged from the Naftali Bennett-esque perspective of his rivals. It’s Rand Paul, who in 2011 proposed eliminating all foreign aid, Israel’s included. But now, after intensively wooing Jewish donors, the Kentucky senator has changed his mind. Today, he supports aid to Israel. It’s aid to the Palestinian Authority he wants to end.
Where does Donald Trump fit in all this? As on most issues, specifics aren’t his strong suit. But this summer he insisted, “I’ve been loyal to Israel from the day I was born.” Trump, it’s worth noting, was born in 1946.
The truly shocking part
But that’s not the shocking part of the 2016 campaign. The shocking part is Hillary Clinton. Obama and Clinton encountered Jews and Israel in very different ways. Before Obama began dealing with AIPAC, he had already forged close bonds to Jews like Newton Minow, who gave him his first legal job; Abner Mikva, who offered him a judicial clerkship; Bettylu Saltzman and Marilyn Katz, who organized the 2002 rally where he denounced the war in Iraq; Arnold Wolf, the rabbi at the synagogue across the street from his house; and David Axelrod, his longtime political consultant.
Having been born to a Kenyan father, having grown up partly in Indonesia, and having had a college roommate from Pakistan, Obama easily grasped the semi-colonial plight of Palestinians who lack citizenship in their own country. And his Chicago Jewish friends didn’t undermine that perspective; they reinforced it. Every one opposed settlement growth. And either loudly or quietly, each broke with the American Jewish establishment over its refusal to criticize Israeli policy in the West Bank. So it’s not surprising that during his pre-presidential years, Obama was, in Wolf’s words, on “the line of Peace Now.”
Hillary Clinton’s introduction was more conventional, and more painful. After saying as First Lady in 1998 that she supported a Palestinian state, which was not yet the official American position, her own husband’s administration disavowed her. Then, the following year, she kissed Suha Arafat after the Palestinian leader’s wife accused Israel of using “poison gas” against Palestinian children, and became the subject of Republican attack ads.
The lesson Hillary learned, and has remembered ever since, is that in American politics, associating yourself with the Palestinian cause never pays. By the time she began campaigning for the Senate in New York in 2000, Hillary had adopted a very different approach to Palestinian statehood. She said that if the Palestinians “unilaterally” declared it, the United States should cut off aid. As a candidate, Hillary also defended Ariel Sharon’s September 2000 visit to the Temple Mount, slammed her husband’s administration for not vetoing a resolution critical of Israel’s response to the violence that followed, pledged to move America’s embassy to Jerusalem and said she was concerned that Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard had been denied “due process.” Most strikingly, during the first weeks of the second intifada, when Israeli soldiers fired 1.3 million bullets, Hillary, in the words of one campaign reporter, did not “earmark a syllable of compassion [even] for the most explicitly blameless of Palestinians” – Palestinian children.
In that Senate campaign, Hillary forged stronger ties to establishment American Jewish groups than Obama did while running in Illinois. And she expressed barely any of his skepticism of Israeli policy. In 2004, candidate Obama said, “The creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this administration in brokering peace.” Hillary, by contrast, declared herself “a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to try to keep those who would do harm to Israel out of Israel.” She never mentioned that most of the barrier isn’t in Israel proper but rather in the West Bank, through which it snakes in order take in as many settlements as possible.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, her aides launched sub rosa attacks on Obama for receiving advice from Bill Clinton’s National Security Council aide Rob Malley and Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, two foreign policy hands distrusted by mainstream Jewish groups. In the words of one well-placed congressional staffer, “every Jewish member [of Congress] knew where AIPAC was” during the 2008 Democratic primary: supporting Hillary.
But all this pales next to what Hillary has done so far in this campaign. In summer 2014, she unofficially launched her presidential bid with a book, “Hard Choices,” about her time as secretary of state. “Hard Choices” is striking both for the way it describes reality and the way it distances Hillary from the policies of the administration she served. Its discussion of Israel begins with the Obama administration’s push for a freeze on settlement growth in 2009, a freeze that Hillary calls “unprecedented.” She admits that this description “caused outrage in Arab countries,” where “people thought I was being too generous toward an offer that was qualified, short term and excluded Jerusalem.” But Hillary then congratulates herself for “telling a hard truth that would cause me trouble.” The implication is that Hillary’s Arab critics just wouldn’t give Israel a break.
But Hillary’s Arab critics were right. It’s not just that the settlement freeze excluded East Jerusalem, which is being severed from the rest of the West Bank by Israeli construction. The “freeze” also exempted buildings on which construction had already begun. This loophole proved crucial, because, as the Israeli press reported at the time, settlers spent the months preceding the freeze feverishly breaking ground on new construction, on which they continued to build during the 10-month freeze, before breaking new ground once it expired. As a result, according to the NGO Peace Now, there was more new settlement construction in 2010 – the year of the freeze – than in 2008. As Hillary’s own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, admitted to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the Obama administration had wanted a freeze that truly stopped settlement growth, but “we failed.”
The real coup
Hillary’s omissions are equally striking when it comes to Gaza. She says that Hamas has “controlled [the Strip] since forcing out its rival Palestinian faction, Fatah, in 2007.” The implication is that Hamas took power in a coup. But Hamas actually won an election. In January 2006, four months after the last settlers left Gaza, Palestinians there, as well as in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, chose representatives to the Palestinian Authority’s parliament. After 10 years of dishonest and authoritarian Fatah rule, a plurality chose Hamas. According to pollster Khalil Shikaki, two-thirds of voters cited either corruption or law and order as their top issue, and 85 percent called the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority corrupt.
After its victory, Hamas called for a national unity government with Fatah “for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied [by Israel] in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.” Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, who had been elected separately the year before, would have remained president. To be sure, Hamas did not recognize Israel, accept past peace agreements or forswear violence. But former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy urged Israel to negotiate a long-term truce with the militant group (something Israel reportedly began doing this year). Israel could also have continued negotiating a two-state deal with Abbas so long as Hamas pledged to accept the outcome of a Palestinian referendum on such a deal, something the group’s leaders later promised to do.
Instead, Bush administration officials pressured Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian parliament and rule by emergency decree. Knowing Hamas would resist Abbas’ efforts to annul the election – especially in Gaza, where it was strong on the ground – the Bushies also began urging Abbas’ former national security adviser, Mohammed Dahlan, to seize power in the Strip by force. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to buy weapons for Dahlan. But when the battle for Gaza began, Hamas won it easily, and brutally.
The real coup, in other words, was not launched by Hamas. It was launched by Fatah and the United States. Instead of acknowledging that decisions in Washington, Tel Aviv and Ramallah helped enable Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, Hillary leaves the reader thinking it was all just the product of Palestinian pathology.
Even more remarkable is Hillary’s near-total omission of any discussion of Israel’s blockade. Because Fatah controlled the West Bank and Hamas controlled Gaza, she writes in her memoir, “Both sides were able to test their approach to governing. The results could be seen every day in Palestinian streets and neighborhoods. In Gaza, Hamas presided over a crumbling enclave of terror and despair. It stockpiled rockets while people fell deeper into poverty. Unemployment ran to nearly 40 percent, and was even higher among young people. Hamas impeded international assistance and the work of humanitarian NGOs and did little to promote sustainable economic growth.”
What Hillary doesn’t mention is that during this “test” of Hamas and Fatah’s “approach to governing,” Israel almost totally shut down Gazan exports to Israel and the West Bank, which had accounted for 85 percent of the Strip’s external market. In the year Hillary’s book was published, according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha, less than one percent as many trucks left Gaza as had before Hamas took over.
Israeli officials justify these measures as necessary for security. And even without the blockade, it’s entirely possible that Hamas would have proved a lousy steward of Gaza’s economy. But to describe Gaza’s descent into “poverty” and “despair” without mentioning the blockade that prevented Gazans from exporting to their biggest markets is wildly dishonest. The implication, once again, is that there is only one true cause of Palestinian suffering: Palestinian depravity.
Embracing Netanyahu
In her book, Hillary also implies that Obama pressured Netanyahu too much. In 2009, in a widely reported encounter, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama, “If you want Israel to take risks, then its leaders must know that the United States is right next to them.” Obama disagreed. “When there is no daylight,” he said, “Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.” In “Hard Choices,” Hillary takes Hoenlein’s side. “I learned,” she writes, “that Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered, but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance you could get something done together.”
So eager is Hillary to prove that Netanyahu responded to her reassurances that she abandons the parameters for a two-state solution her husband famously laid out in 2000. In “Hard Choices,” she mentions that Abbas “said that he could live with an Israeli military deployment in the Jordan Valley for a few years beyond the establishment of a new state,” while Netanyahu “insisted that Israeli troops remain along the border for many decades without a fixed date for withdrawal.” Hillary deems these two perspectives equally valid, and even sees in Bibi’s a glimmer of hope. “I thought that was a potentially significant opening,” she writes. “If the conversation was about years, not decades or months, then perhaps the right mix of international security support and advanced border protection tactics and techniques could bridge the gap.”
What Hillary doesn’t mention is that Abbas’ approach conforms to the Clinton parameters – the very document she elsewhere in the book slams Yasser Arafat for not accepting – which propose that Israel leave the Jordan Valley in three years. Netanyahu’s approach, by contrast, flagrantly contradicts those parameters.
In the year since Hillary released her book, she’s done this again and again: Embraced Netanyahu’s perspective even though it eviscerates her husband's, and Obama’s, vision of a viable Palestinian state. Two months after her book release, in an August 2014 interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hillary noted that “in my meetings with them I got Abbas to about six, seven, eight years on continued IDF presence [in the Jordan Valley] … I got Netanyahu to go from forever to 2025. That’s a negotiation, okay?” Yes, it’s a negotiation. But it’s a negotiation in which Hillary’s strategy of hugging Bibi close, and not making him feel “cornered,” allows him to lead the United States further and further away from an even modestly sovereign Palestinian state.
As the campaign has gone on, in fact, Hillary’s perspective has moved ever closer to Netanyahu’s. “I know what the hard decisions are,” she declared at a campaign stop in Iowa last month. “For the Israelis it is security … For the Palestinians, it is autonomy.” Perhaps Hillary just chose her words poorly. But what Palestinian leaders have been demanding for decades now is emphatically not autonomy; it’s sovereignty. Or, put another way, it’s the individual and national rights that sovereignty might bring. “Autonomy,” by contrast, is what Israeli leaders have periodically offered in lieu of a state. “Would the Palestinian Arabs accept autonomy?” asked Netanyahu in a 1994 Jerusalem Post op-ed entitled “The Alternative is Autonomy." He wrote: “My answer is that they would accept it if they knew Israel wouldn’t give them an independent state.”
In 2009, Netanyahu supposedly reversed this position and declared himself in favor of a Palestinian state. But this year, in a series of statements, he has publicly flipped back and made it clear he doesn’t favor Palestinian sovereignty anytime soon. Is it mere coincidence that now that Netanyahu is back to favoring “autonomy,” and Hillary is courting hawkish Jewish voters and donors, she’s aping his view?
Netanyahu’s current position is that while he still wants a Palestinian state one day, “the dramatic changes that have occurred in the last few years in the region” have made that impossible for the time being. That’s now Hillary’s view, too. In Iowa she declared that, “It is very difficult to figure out how either the Palestinians or the Israelis can put together a deal until they know what is going to happen in Syria, and until they know if Jordan will remain stable.” If that’s really Hillary’s perspective, it constitutes an utter repudiation of the Obama administration’s. And it means that her position is now almost identical to that of Rubio, the man most likely to be her general election opponent, who said last May, “I don’t think the conditions exist for” a Palestinian state “today.”
Hawkish stance
One can defend Hillary’s new point of view. After all, the Middle East is more chaotic than it was during her husband’s administration. Harder to defend is her almost total refusal to publicly acknowledge Palestinian rights and dignity. In her Middle East policy speech at the Brookings Institution two months ago, Hillary mentioned Israel 40 times and the Palestinians not once. She referred to Hamas three times but never mentioned the people of Gaza. The “national security” section of her campaign website mentions Israel five times and the Palestinians none. Even when her website endorses two states, the Palestinians are absent. Hillary, the site promises, will “partner with Israel to advance the two-state vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel with secure and recognized borders.” There’s no reference to working with Palestinians, or fulfilling their aspirations.
Hillary’s response to the rising violence in Israel has been to declare herself “alarmed by the recent wave of attacks against Israelis … Men and women living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere cannot carry groceries or travel to prayer without looking over their shoulder.” Reading the statement, you wouldn’t know a single Palestinian had died.
It’s a far cry from Obama, who in “The Audacity of Hope” affirmed the common, and equal, humanity of both Palestinians and Jews. “Traveling through Israel and the West Bank,” he wrote, “I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost. I flew by helicopter across the line separating the two peoples and found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills.”
When Obama travelled to Israel in 2013, he affirmed Palestinian humanity again. He asked his mostly Jewish Israeli audience to “Put yourself in their [the Palestinians’] shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own. Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day.”
Why won’t Hillary say anything like this? Partly, I suspect, it’s because her overall foreign policy outlook is simply more hawkish. Obama is the first American president with a deep experience of the developing world. He also became an adult after Vietnam, and was thus less scarred by the experience of seeing Democrats lose elections for being too dovish. Hillary, by contrast, had a far more conventional upbringing in a mostly white, middle class suburb of Chicago. While in law school, she worked on the campaign of George McGovern, who denounced the Vietnam War as immoral, and lost 49 states. Then, in her husband’s administration, she became a booster of military force in Bosnia and Kosovo. Israel isn’t the only issue on which she has leaned away from Obama and toward the GOP. In 2002, she backed the Iraq War. Like John McCain, she’s demanding a no-fly zone in Syria now.
The Democratic shift
But the irony of Hillary’s current stance is that while she’s drifting toward Netanyahu, ordinary Democrats are drifting away from him. Between early 2014 and early 2015, according to Gallup, the percentage of Democrats who said they identified more with Israelis than Palestinians dropped 10 points. A Pew Research Center poll last March found that while Republicans have an overwhelmingly favorable opinion of Netanyahu, Democrats view him negatively by a margin of two to one. Among liberal Democrats, who play a disproportionate role in the primary process, it’s three to one.
This shift is part of a larger ideological and cultural change. The Democratic Party, which once had a strong working class white base, is increasingly dominated by minorities, professionals and the secular young, who tend to distrust nationalism, military force and conservative religion, all of which Americans identify with Israel. On almost every domestic issue – from crime to guns to Wall Street to the environment – this new coalition is pushing Hillary to the left. Yet on Israel, so far, it’s giving her a total pass.
That’s partly because most Democrats just don’t care that much about Israel. Except when Americans are dying overseas, voters as a whole – and liberals in particular – mostly focus on the domestic concerns that affect them day-to-day. The Democrats who do care most about Israel, and who have the resources to get a candidates’ ear, are people like Haim Saban, the hawkish billionaire who helps fund Hillary’s campaigns.
But anti-Netanyahu Democrats would care more if they had a presidential candidate who did. Instead, they have Bernie Sanders, who has drawn huge crowds talking about income inequality and financial corruption, but talks as little as possible about the Jewish state. Unlike Hillary, Sanders does acknowledge Palestinian suffering. His website calls on Israel to “end the blockade of Gaza, and cease developing settlements on Palestinian land.” But Sanders gives entire speeches without mentioning anything having to do with foreign policy. Until September, his campaign website didn’t say anything about it at all.
Sanders’ relative silence is something of a mystery. Despite being Jewish and having reportedly spent time early in life on a kibbutz, he doesn’t express much concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And until recently, as an obscure senator from a liberal and not very Jewish state, he didn’t need to. But the consequences of this idiosyncrasy are quite large. If Sanders challenged Hillary on Israel, many liberal activists would back him, thus pressuring her to halt her rightward drift. In a Democratic primary, holding the same position as Marco Rubio isn’t easy to defend. If Sanders made Israel-Palestine an issue, he might at least force Hillary to distinguish herself from the GOP and restate her commitment to a Palestinian state. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe he will.
The harsh truth, therefore, is that the next president will almost certainly care less about the Palestinians than the current one. And when it comes to progress toward basic rights for the millions of people who live without citizenship and the right to vote under Israeli authority today, even this current president has accomplished almost nothing.
Is it any wonder why the Palestinians have given up on the United States?
Democrats’ platform recognizes Palestinian aspirations, rejects ‘occupation’ language
Former Rep. Howard Berman, left, and Cornel West, at right, listening to testimony at a Democratic Party platform drafting committee hearing in Washington, D.C., June 9 2016. (Ron Kampeas)
Democrats altered their platform to reflect Palestinian aspirations but rejected language calling for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and settlement activity.
According to an Associated Press report emailed to reporters late Saturday by the Bernie Sanders campaign, the platform calls for a two-state solution but does not frame it purely as an outcome that benefits Israel, as previous platforms have.
It declares that achieving Palestinian statehood would provide “the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity.”
The platform drafting committee of the Democratic National Committee met in cities across the country. The meeting this weekend, which wrapped up the draft and where the Israel-related language was approved, was held in St. Louis. The full platform committee will vote on the draft on July 8-9 in Orlando, Florida.
The committee rejected language proposed by James Zogby, a Sanders appointee to the committee and the president of the Arab American Institute, that called for “an end to occupation and illegal settlements.”
Zogby said Sanders, the Vermont Independent senator and the first Jewish candidate to win major nominating contests, helped draft the rejected language.
According to tweets by Josh Ruebner, the policy director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, who was monitoring in real time the St. Louis meeting of the platform drafting committee, Zogby’s language was defeated in an 8-5 vote at around midnight Friday.
Speaking against Zogby’s language were Wendy Sherman, a former deputy secretary of state and an appointee named by Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Howard Berman, a former California congressman who was named to the committee by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the DNC chairwoman. Advocating for the language was Cornel West, a Sanders appointee and a philosopher who backs the boycott Israel movement.
Keeping out language that could potentially alienate the pro-Israel community was a priority to the Clinton campaign. Earlier this week, Jake Sullivan, her senior foreign policy adviser, emailed JTA to say that “Hillary Clinton’s steadfast support for Israel, and the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, are well known. As we have said previously, she remains confident that the party platform will reflect her views.”
Clinton has secured enough delegates to win the first round of voting at the convention in Philadelphia next week. Sanders, unusually for a candidate who is set to lose, was given five spots on the platform drafting committee, a reflection of the strength of his campaign. Clinton named six and Wasserman Schultz the remaining four.
Zogby and another Sanders appointee to the committee who advocates for Palestinian rights, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., seemed happy with the overall platform, saying Sanders scored wins on his proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, break up big banks and expand social security.
“We got some great stuff in the platform that has never been in there before,” Zogby told AP.
J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group, praised the Israel-related language.
“The new language breaks with the party’s practice of framing its aim of establishing a Palestinian state solely in terms of Israel’s interests,” it said in a statement. “By including parallel acknowledgement of Israeli and Palestinian rights, the party underscores its belief that the only viable resolution to the conflict — a two-state solution — requires recognizing the fates of the two peoples are intertwined.”
According to an Associated Press report emailed to reporters late Saturday by the Bernie Sanders campaign, the platform calls for a two-state solution but does not frame it purely as an outcome that benefits Israel, as previous platforms have.
It declares that achieving Palestinian statehood would provide “the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity.”
The platform drafting committee of the Democratic National Committee met in cities across the country. The meeting this weekend, which wrapped up the draft and where the Israel-related language was approved, was held in St. Louis. The full platform committee will vote on the draft on July 8-9 in Orlando, Florida.
The committee rejected language proposed by James Zogby, a Sanders appointee to the committee and the president of the Arab American Institute, that called for “an end to occupation and illegal settlements.”
Zogby said Sanders, the Vermont Independent senator and the first Jewish candidate to win major nominating contests, helped draft the rejected language.
According to tweets by Josh Ruebner, the policy director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, who was monitoring in real time the St. Louis meeting of the platform drafting committee, Zogby’s language was defeated in an 8-5 vote at around midnight Friday.
Speaking against Zogby’s language were Wendy Sherman, a former deputy secretary of state and an appointee named by Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Howard Berman, a former California congressman who was named to the committee by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the DNC chairwoman. Advocating for the language was Cornel West, a Sanders appointee and a philosopher who backs the boycott Israel movement.
Keeping out language that could potentially alienate the pro-Israel community was a priority to the Clinton campaign. Earlier this week, Jake Sullivan, her senior foreign policy adviser, emailed JTA to say that “Hillary Clinton’s steadfast support for Israel, and the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, are well known. As we have said previously, she remains confident that the party platform will reflect her views.”
Clinton has secured enough delegates to win the first round of voting at the convention in Philadelphia next week. Sanders, unusually for a candidate who is set to lose, was given five spots on the platform drafting committee, a reflection of the strength of his campaign. Clinton named six and Wasserman Schultz the remaining four.
Zogby and another Sanders appointee to the committee who advocates for Palestinian rights, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., seemed happy with the overall platform, saying Sanders scored wins on his proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, break up big banks and expand social security.
“We got some great stuff in the platform that has never been in there before,” Zogby told AP.
J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group, praised the Israel-related language.
“The new language breaks with the party’s practice of framing its aim of establishing a Palestinian state solely in terms of Israel’s interests,” it said in a statement. “By including parallel acknowledgement of Israeli and Palestinian rights, the party underscores its belief that the only viable resolution to the conflict — a two-state solution — requires recognizing the fates of the two peoples are intertwined.”
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Arab MK Hanen Zoabi Calls IDF Soldiers Murders from the Podium of the Knesset. Hell NO she must GO.
Hanin Zoabi
Wesnesday 29.6.16 , an Arab-Israeli lawmaker called Israeli soldiers “murderers” on the floor of the Knesset, spurring talk of impeachment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The lawmaker, Hanin Zoabi, also demanded in her remarks Wednesday afternoon that the Knesset apologize for the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident in which Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish citizens in clashes on a boat attempting to break Israel’s Gaza blockade. Netanyahu has apologized to Turkey for the incident.
Zoabi, who made the “murderers” remark as visiting soldiers were observing the parliament from the visitors’ gallery, also demanded Knesset lawmakers apologize to her. She has been censured by the Knesset, including when she participated in the Mavi Marmara flotilla and recently after she met with Palestinian terrorists’ families and stood for a moment of silence in their memories.
“I demand an apology for all the political activists on the Marmara and an apology to MK Hanin Zoabi for inciting against her for six years and hounding her. You all need to apologize, all of the members of Knesset here,” Zoabi said. “Those who murdered need to apologize, you need to apologize.”
After she was shouted down by fellow Knesset members, some of whom rushed the podium in order to remove her by force, Zoabi asked to return to the microphone to apologize. But instead, she said: “As long as there is a blockade [on Gaza], I will object to the blockade, and there’s a need to organize more flotillas.”
Knesset members responded by calling Zoabi “liar” and “filth,” and saying “You belong in Gaza.”
Zoabi’s statements came a day after Israel and Turkey signed a reconciliation deal restoring ties that had been severed following the Mavi Marmara episode.
Lawmakers Nachman Shai of the Zionist Union party and Amir Ohana of Likud filed complaints against Zoabi with the Knesset’s Ethics Committee, which is expected to meet and discuss the incident.
On Wednesday evening, Netanyahu said he contacted Attorney General Avichai Mandelblot to discuss starting the process of impeaching Zoabi from the Knesset.
“She has crossed the line in her deeds and her lies, and has no place in the Knesset,” he said in a statement that was posted on Facebook.
Netanyahu apologized for the deaths in a 2013 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The apology was a Turkish condition for the resumption of diplomatic ties.
Haneen Zoabi, also Hanin Zoubi (Arabic: Øنين زعبي, Hebrew: ×—× ×™×Ÿ זועבי; born 23 May 1969), is aPalestinian Arab, and an Arab citizen of Israel, who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for theJoint List. Serving in the Knesset since 2009, Zoabi is the first Arab woman to be elected to Israel's parliament on an Arab party's list.[1] Representing the Balad party, Zoabi was elected in the 2009 and 2013 legislative elections.
Biography
Haneen Zoabi was born in Nazareth to a Muslim family. Zoabi studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Haifa, earning a Bachelor of Arts, and received a Master of Arts in communications from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was the first Arab citizen of Israel to graduate in media studies, and established the first media classes in Arab schools. She also worked as a mathematics teacher and worked as a school inspector for the Israeli Ministry of Education.
She is a relative of Seif el-Din el-Zoubi, a former mayor of Nazareth and member of the Knesset between 1949 and 1959, and again from 1965 until 1979, and Abd el-Aziz el-Zoubi, a Deputy Health Minister and the first Arab member of an Israeli government.
Political career
Zoabi joined Balad in 2001. In 2003, she co-founded the NGO I'lam – Media Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel (pronounced e'e'lam). Zoabi was its general director until she resigned shortly before the 2009 election to focus on her political career.
Prior to the 2009 elections she won third place on the Balad list, and entered the Knesset after the party won three seats. She thus became the firstfemale Arab MK to represent an Arab party (preceded by Hussniya Jabara and Nadia Hilou on non-Arab lists). Zoabi ran for Knesset as a Balad candidate in 2006, but was too low on the party's electoral list to win a seat.
Political views and opinions
Zoabi views herself as a Palestinian. She considers the two-state solution unrealistic and describes as inherently racist the notion that Israel is aJewish state. Instead she advocates a single state shared by Jews and Palestinian Arabs with full rights and equality for both national groups. She has said, "The reality of Israel's actions shows us that it's unrealistic to have a real sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as the capital. The more realistic solution is one state with full national equality for both national groups." Zoabi argues that rejection of the Jewish state concept is the only way to combat Avigdor Lieberman's demand that Israeli citizens take loyalty oaths. Rejecting 'Jewish state' concept, she says, "is the only idea that can remove Lieberman from the circle of political and moral legitimacy... When you agree with the 'Jewish state' idea, you necessarily agree with the idea of loyalty to this state. Rejecting the 'Jewish state' concept will block the road for anyone who demands our loyalty to such a state." In 2009, she met with Code Pink, and Coalition of Women for Peace.
She also believes that the West should engage with rather than boycott Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip. She commented, "No one can tell the Palestinian people whom to choose as a government. Hamas is not a terrorist organization. ... Regardless of whether I disagree [with Hamas], the international community cannot mediate neutrally if it starts to label the organizations of the Palestinians as illegitimate."
Zoabi in 2009 described Lieberman, Tzipi Livni, and Benjamin Netanyahu as "a bunch of fascists pure and simple". She added, however, that [Netanyahu] is "much more dangerous" than Lieberman, because he "shares Lieberman's fascist views but takes care to sugarcoat his message for the international media"
At the 18th Knesset swearing-in ceremony on February 24, 2009, she left the Knesset plenum before the singing of Hatikva, Israel's national anthem. "'Hatikva' doesn't represent me", she later said. "I preferred to leave the room, because I don't appreciate hypocrisy."
According to the Jerusalem Post, Zoabi has not denounced the alleged Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, in part because she does not believe Iran has acquired them. She explained, "I am afraid of real risk rather than of potential risk. The Iranian bomb was only "a potential" threat. The real danger is the IDF. ... It is more dangerous to the world, more dangerous to everyone, more dangerous to the Palestinians, to Israelis, to have Israel as the only powerful state. ... The violence of the Israeli army is an outcome of Israel's convenient feeling that no one will restrict her".Zoabi has also asked "if the world doesn't prevent Israel from having nuclear weapons, why does it prevent others?".
Zoabi and the Balad party reject any form of national service for Israel's Arab citizens.
Participation in the Gaza flotilla
On 31 May 2010, Zoabi participated in the Gaza flotilla, and was on board the MV Mavi Marmara when violence broke out as Israeli commandos boarded the ship. Zoabi was arrested and briefly held by authorities. At a news conference upon her release, Zoabi called the raid criminal, saying she witnessed two wounded passengers bleed to death after the Israelis refused to provide requested medical aid. She also stated, "It was clear from the size of the force that boarded the ship that the purpose was not only to stop this sail, but to cause the largest possible number of fatalities in order to stop such initiatives in the future."
In a speech at the Knesset a day after her release, Zoabi called the raid a "pirate military operation" and asked for an international investigation.She also demanded to know why the Israeli government had not released photos and videos it confiscated from passengers that might shed light on why nine passengers were killed and dozens wounded. During her address she also said, "Israel spoke of a provocation, but there was no provocation. Why does the government of Israel oppose an investigation?"
Zoabi was repeatedly interrupted and shouted down during the speech by other lawmakers, one of whom shouted "Go to Gaza, traitor!" The chaos reached a peak when MK Anastasia Michaeli charged the podium in an attempt to prevent Zoabi from continuing. Zoabi received death threats after the speech, and two security guards were assigned for her protection. One man who offered a reward on Facebook of free groceries for killing Zoabi was arrested
Zoabi commented three years after the events, "I came to the Knesset two days after the Marmara events, stunned by the way a political protest had become a bloodbath. I hoped that the MKs would want to hear firsthand testimony. I was ready to be questioned. But I was so naive. I encountered hate politics."
For her participation in the Gaza flotilla, Israel Interior Minister Eli Yishai requested that Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein revoke Zoabi's parliamentary immunity and authorize Yishai to strip Zoabi of Israeli citizenship. Yishai accused Zoabi of engaging in a "premeditated act of treason", claiming she had assisted activists on board the Mavi Marmara and was "undoubtedly aware" of their preparations to attack IDF soldiers. Likud MK Yariv Levin also accused Zoabi of betraying the State of Israel, and called for her prosecution.
A Knesset committee voted 7–1 to recommend her parliamentary immunity be revoked, which attracted concern from the international Inter-Parliamentary Union and was ultimately blocked by Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, who ignored the recommendation and declined to submit it to a vote of the full Knesset. He and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hoped that sparing Zoabi would protect Israel from further international condemnation over its Gaza blockade and its military's actions aboard the Mavi Marmara.[citation needed] Rivlin, known for his advocacy of Arab–Jewish coexistence, said he was stunned by the assault on Zoabi's privileges as well as the near physical attack upon her. He asked, "Would they do that to a Jewish member?"
When the full Knesset met on 13 July 2010, it decided, in a 34–16 vote, to strip Zoabi of three parliamentary privileges as a penalty for her participation in the flotilla: the right to have a diplomatic passport, entitlement to financial assistance should she require legal help, and the right to visit countries with which Israel does not have diplomatic relations. She was also stripped of the right to participate in Knesset discussions and to vote in parliamentary committees. In 2011, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein closed the case against Zoabi because of "significant evidentiary and legal difficulties."
Israeli Foreign Ministry tweets
Partly because of an Israeli embassy's tweets about Zoabi, in August 2012, the Foreign Ministry of Israel updated its social media guidelines for its worldwide diplomats, clarifying that for practical purposes there is no difference between a tweet or on-line social media post and an official briefing, as they will be interpreted as Israel's official position. This move followed several embarrassing incidents where inappropriate tweets or posts were made by Israeli embassies. One major embarrassment occurred when Zoabi made a speaking tour of Ireland. When she criticized Israel in some of her speeches, the Dublin-based Israeli embassy in Ireland responded with three tweets critical of her, in spite of the fact that she is an elected official.
Attempted disqualification
In December 2012, it was announced that the Central Elections Committee and a panel of Supreme Court judges would hold discussions on whether to disqualify Zoabi, as well as the Balad and United Arab List parties, from the 2013 election. The request for her disqualification, submitted by MK Ofir Akunis (Likud) and which obtained the necessary number of signatures, stated that "throughout her years in the Knesset, Zoabi has constantly undermined the State of Israel and has openly incited against the government, its institutions and IDF soldiers." The request further noted that Zoabi negated Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state, which makes Knesset candidates eligible for disqualification. Zoabi called the sponsors of the request fascists and said that "for whoever does not want citizens to have free elections, I am one of many targets ..." She added that only "dark regimes" are proud of disqualifying election candidates. After hearing the case, the Central Elections Committee disqualified Zoabi in a 19–9 vote
The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the disqualification, with the nine-judge panel headed by Supreme Court President Asher Grunis unanimously voting to overturn the ban In response, in February 2013, MK Danny Danon initiated a bill dubbed the "Zoabi Law", as an amendment to the Basic Law dealing with legislation. Specifically aimed at Zoabi, the new law would make it harder for the Supreme Court to overturn a decision by the Central Elections Committee.] The bill did not pass the Knesset.
On February 12, 2015, Israel's Central Elections Committee voted, 27–6, to disqualify Zoabi from running in the following month's Knesset election. A few days later, on February 18, Israel's High Court of Justice overturned that ruling in an 8–1 decision, freeing Zoabi to run in the March 17 election
2014 kidnapping comments and Knesset suspension
On 15 July 2014, five days after the kidnapping by Palestinians of three Israeli teenagers, Zoabi said, "Is it strange that people living under occupation and living impossible lives, in a situation where Israel kidnaps new prisoners every day, is it strange that they kidnap? They are not terrorists. Even if I do not agree with them, they are people who do not see any way to change their reality, and they are compelled to use means like these".
Many Israeli public figures criticized Zoabi's words. Labor opposition leader Issac Herzog said they "were harmful to peace and the coexistence of Jews and Arabs in Israel as well as to the families who are hopefully awaiting news regarding their missing loved ones." Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said that "not only are the kidnappers terrorists, Hanin Zoabi is a terrorist too." Echoing comments by other Israeli politicians, Knesset Interior Committee chairwoman Miri Regev said, "Hanin Zoabi is a traitor and should be deported to Gaza."
Zoabi reported receiving hundreds of death threats in the first days after her comments. She commented, "I was taken by surprise at the public's reaction. I was surprised since the injustice inflicted on the other side is so much greater. There are thousands of abducted Palestinians in Israeli prisons. ... It's not that I want Israelis to be abducted and not released. The exact opposite is the case."On 25 July, Israeli attorney general Yehuda Weinstein ordered an investigation of Zoabi on charges of incitement and public disgrace. On 29 July, Zoabi was suspended from the Knesset plenum for a duration of six months.During that time she was not allowed to address the Knesset or its committees. Zoabi's appeal to Israel's Supreme Court to overturn the suspension was rejected.
Rabbi Benzion Klatzko, The Power of Anecdotes, Props and Stories and the Contribution of Judaism and Psychology in the Diaspera and Zion
Rabbi Benzion Klatzko, The Power of Anecdotes, Props and Stories and the contribution of Judaism and Psychology in the Diaspora and Zion
Rabbi Benzion Klatzko is the Founder of Shabbat.com and National Collegiate Educational Director. If you are not a member of this, the largest Jewish and Zionist Social Media site then do join Shabbat.com is completely free with no premium facilities that are no also freemium . Shabbat.com has two major goals. The first is the Shabbat Experience. Hosting guests on Shabbat is a Mitzva. There are 7361 Hosts in The US, 714 in Canada, 1694 in Israel, 414 in the UK ,and even 112 in France , 143 in South Africa and 145 in Australia where Shabbat.com is just starting to get known.The second goal is the extremely popular Dating Module which is very different from all other Jewish Dating and Matchmaking sites. You control your own narrative and the general questionnaire is devoid of anything not relevant. Over 40% of all Shabbat.com members are Eligible Singles. You can appoint a matchmaker of your choice or handle your own matchmaker. Perhaps the nicest thing in this unique dating site is the lack of anonymity and the need by definition to use real names. Like the Dating Profile of someone ...but not sure, ,,,, simply extend your search using his or her real name to Linkedin, Facebook and by Googling and Microsoft Edge
Jews have engaged with and steered psychological inquiry since its inception.Jewish psychologists and the influence of Jewish tradition have been instrumental in creating the field of modern psychology. The fundaments of several psychological movements can be traced directly to Jewish values, ideas, and practices, and Jews in the 20th century were at the forefront of research about the psyche and the varieties of human behavior.
Rabbi Benzion Klatzko is the Founder of Shabbat.com and National Collegiate Educational Director. If you are not a member of this, the largest Jewish and Zionist Social Media site then do join Shabbat.com is completely free with no premium facilities that are no also freemium . Shabbat.com has two major goals. The first is the Shabbat Experience. Hosting guests on Shabbat is a Mitzva. There are 7361 Hosts in The US, 714 in Canada, 1694 in Israel, 414 in the UK ,and even 112 in France , 143 in South Africa and 145 in Australia where Shabbat.com is just starting to get known.The second goal is the extremely popular Dating Module which is very different from all other Jewish Dating and Matchmaking sites. You control your own narrative and the general questionnaire is devoid of anything not relevant. Over 40% of all Shabbat.com members are Eligible Singles. You can appoint a matchmaker of your choice or handle your own matchmaker. Perhaps the nicest thing in this unique dating site is the lack of anonymity and the need by definition to use real names. Like the Dating Profile of someone ...but not sure, ,,,, simply extend your search using his or her real name to Linkedin, Facebook and by Googling and Microsoft Edge
Jews have engaged with and steered psychological inquiry since its inception.Jewish psychologists and the influence of Jewish tradition have been instrumental in creating the field of modern psychology. The fundaments of several psychological movements can be traced directly to Jewish values, ideas, and practices, and Jews in the 20th century were at the forefront of research about the psyche and the varieties of human behavior.
Jewish psychologists founded several branches of psychological inquiry. All of the major theorists of the Gestalt school, except Wolfgang Kohler, were Jews. Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Kurt Lewin, and Kurt Goldstein posited theories of perception and understanding based on holistic understanding, rather than a previous model based on the computation of parts.
Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud and, with the notable exception of Carl Jung, most of its early proponents were also Jews.
Why the Jews?
Some intellectual historians speculate that it was particular Jewish personality and cultural traits that led Jews to lead the field of psychology in its early days.
In a social psychology study of Jewish families, researchers F.M. Herz and E.J. Rosen found that in contrast to some other ethnic groups, Jews on the whole tend to choose verbal expression as a way of expressing emotions, particularly negative or painful experiences. Historical circumstances of oppression, segregation, and confined living conditions often resulted in close-knit communities of Jews who felt their pain deeply and expressed it to one another plainly.
According to studies conducted by Mark Zborowski, an anthropologist who investigated cultural aspects of pain, Jews respond more quickly to physical discomfort than non-Jews. Jewish families often discuss issues and problems in great detail, and suffering individuals are encouraged to “let out” their feelings and achieve catharsis through communication.
According to Peter Langman, “Jews differ from many cultural groups in that they place less value on self-reliance and are less suspicious of taking their problems to professionals.” Thus, the traditional role of rabbi/rebbe involves extensive counseling or psychotherapy.
Traditionally, there was even what today we would call an “intake.” The gabai (rebbe”s assistant) met with people before they met with the rebbe, and then: “After interviewing the supplicant about his family, his background and his troubles, the gabai delivers the kvitl [written description of the presenting problem] and an oral report to the rebbe” (Zborowski & Herzog, 1995, p. 172).
Psychoanalysis and Freud
But it took Josef Breuer, an assimilated Jewish doctor living in Berlin, to apply this “talking cure” with his Jewish patient, Bertha Pappenheim, to ignite the practice of psychoanalysis. These two understood that when they talked about her symptoms, and particularly their origin and emotional side effects, she would feel better. Pappenheim, a notable figure on the scene of Berlin’s intellectual salons, is also well-known as Freud’s case study about Anna O.
Sigmund Freud’s Jewishness is a hotly debated subject. He always described his father’s background as Hasidic, and his mother was raised traditionally Jewish. Though by the time he was growing up the family had partially assimilated, Freud acknowledged how influenced he was by Jewish thought, and the mystical tradition in particular.
David Bakan, in his 1958 book, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition showed that Freud was familiar with, and interested in Kabbalah. Bakan advanced the idea that Freud’s psychoanalysis was a secularization of Jewish mysticism.
According to Langman and Dana Beth Wasserman (1990), Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreamswas based on interpretive methods used to understand dreams in the Talmud. The aspects of Freudian dream psychology that seemed perhaps shocking to the gentile public were already part of Jewish text: symbolism, word play, enactment of taboos, and numerology.
Psychoanalysis, as it then developed into a standardized practice, was dominated by Jewish men; Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Hans Sachs were a few of the 17 initial members of the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna. Peter Langman has written that, contrary to a prevailing notion of this group’s secular orientation, “the analysts were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained a sense of Jewish purpose and solidarity.”
Later contributors to the practice of psychoanalysis also included a disproportionate number of Jews: Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Otto Rank and Bruno Bettelheim.
In fact, the practice had become so dominated by Jews that Sigmund Freud based his decision to hand over leadership of the movement to Carl Jung partially because he was not Jewish and would therefore refute the position that psychoanalysis was a Jewish conspiracy. Jung, however, became very interested in Kabbalah and continued to pursue this interest, ultimately linking kabbalistic beliefs with his understanding of the “collective unconscious.”
Other Major Contributors
Erich Fromm evinced a particularly Jewish ethos in his studies of ethics, love, and human freedom. Fromm had studied Talmud extensively in his youth in Germany, and was guided by his father and grandfather, both rabbis. Though he became largely secular in his interpretations of Hebrew scripture, the influence of biblical stories, particularly in Genesis, greatly impacted his work.
In the realm of popular psychology, Joseph Jastrow, whose father authored the well-known Talmud dictionary, was the first recipient of an American Ph.D. in psychology in 1898 and established a psychology lab at the University of Wisconsin. With a syndicated advice column and a talk radio show, he was the first psychologist to stir up public interest in psychological inquiry.
During the same time period, Hugo Munsterberg founded American applied psychology and became a well-known figure in America with his numerous books and magazine articles. Boris Sidis pioneered personality studies, entertaining the public with his spectacular cases of split personalities.
Abraham Arden Brill and Isador Coriat brought Freud beyond the European urban centers by translating his work into English. Influential psychoanalyst Alfred Adler also fed the public’s hunger for in-depth knowledge of their inner lives by going on lecture tours and giving numerous interviews in which he was helped by his translator, the psychiatrist Walter Beran Wolfe.
Jewish Texts and Ideas
All of these psychologists received a solid Jewish education, at least during their childhood years, and for some of them, this exposure to Jewish mores and stories influenced their later work by providing archetypal human relationships, such as the conflict between son and father, represented in Abraham and Isaac, and the lament of childless women like Sara.
In particular, Adler used the original family networks of the Torah to illuminate contemporary family dynamics. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, along with other forefathers and mothers, provided models for kinship behavior.
Furthermore, Jewish involvement in the development of psychology in the early 20th century helped to create a more tolerant culture than in Western Europe. As Jewish psychologists participated in researching and defining human nature, they also sought scientific justifications of the role of the Jew in modern society.
Many of them popularized aspects of their studies and advocated against prevailing conceptions about hereditary intelligence, ethnic stereotypes, and particularly Christian interpretations of the unconscious. They also delved into previously taboo aspects of human behavior, producing classic studies of the social psychology of sexuality, deviance, and immorality.
Capitalizing on the wide appeal of their ideas, Jewish psychologists articulated a state of mental health and social cohesion that served the dual purpose of benefiting the Jewish and other immigrant communities, particularly in America.
Jewish understanding of the roots of human behavior as communicated in the Talmud are often more in tune with the revelations of psychological science than other religious frameworks. In Jewish tradition, the impulse to do good, the yetzer hatov, is balanced out by the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. This complex idea that every individual embodies productive and destructive instincts allows for a more nuanced self-development process than a moral compass that sees the pure individual tainted by sin and in need of salvation.
Issues in Jewish Psychology Today
Some Jews have since seized upon the insights of modern psychology to address issues of mental illness in the Jewish community. Their specifically Jewish psychology infuses a scientific understanding of the functioning of the mind and emotions with an appreciation of God and Jewish history.
Rabbi Abraham Twerski, for example, has done much to educate these communities about addiction and domestic abuse, even drawing specific parallels to the practices of Alcoholics Anonymous and wisdom in the Talmud. Other practitioners like Rabbi Harold Kushner and Dr. Joyce Brothers have applied Jewish wisdom and insight to modern relationships, and have gained a huge following among Jews and non-Jews alike.
And yet many observant Jewish communities have been slow to take on the insights of psychology, remaining in denial about specific mental health issues. This might be because psychological theories can conflict with traditional Jewish ideas. The Jewish system of mitzvot, commandments, presumes that individuals have agency and free will. Classical psychological concepts like the unconscious and contemporary approaches that stress psychopharmacology and the physiology of psychological disorders may challenge traditional Jewish notions of “freedom.”
In the secular world, however, Jews have assumed a central role in the formation of new psychological theories and applications to this day, and the continuing contribution of Jews to the field of psychology is a testament to the perceptive position of the Jewish people and the emotionally astute cultural heritage that binds them.
Ha'data Schmata everything is Prorata in Zion
Ha'data Schmata everything is Prorata in Zion.The ‘Religionization’ of Israel is troubling, but the fears about it are hysterical
Headlines could convince a stranger that Israel is like a Hebrew-speaking version of Iran,
Religionization! Religionization! To read the newspaper headlines in Israel, to view its documentary films and attend its expert panels with academics, a stranger might think that upon landing at Ben Gurion Airport, he or she will have arrived at nothing less than a Hebrew-speaking version of Iran.
According to those who fear for Israel’s Jewish and democratic future, religionization (“ha’datah” in Hebrew) is everywhere. Within Israel’s educational system, right-wing and religious ministers are infusing class curricula with religious content. The justice system in the country increasingly includes judges and other senior level officials who are religious, and are threatening, so it appears, to implement “Hebrew” law. Israel’s communications sector is suddenly being overrun by men wearing skull caps, who are bringing their worldviews and values from home to the workplace. The chief of police is religious as well. And at what point will the people’s army transform into God’s army?
In such an atmosphere, the use of any Jewish content in official government statements; any attempt by a religious person to stand up for her rights; the celebration of any Jewish holiday at any secular school anywhere, and every mention of God within the context of the Israel Defense Forces is more proof that religion is taking over our lives — that we are in the throes of a terrible process of religionization.
The reality, however, is clearly different from this perception. Tel Aviv is not Tehran. Neither is it Jerusalem. The IDF is fighting for the country and its people, not God. Israel’s educational system is not rediscovering religion en masse. And while the Israeli public is most certainly changing, it’s actually doing so in the direction of secularization. The status quo in the country between religion and state is long since dead. Commercial and leisure activities during the Sabbath are more widespread today than in the past and homosexual couples are receiving official recognition. All this in spite of the fact that for 30 years there has existed an ultra-religious veto, overtly or covertly, within the government.
Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. I, as well as many citizens, religious and secular, believe that these two characteristics are critical to the country’s existence. Just as Israel’s Jewish image and identity must be cultivated, so must its democratic character and liberal and humanistic values. And no, there is no contradiction between Jewish and democratic.
The exact balance between these values is not gospel. Neither is it the exclusive knowledge of the religious or secular. Even the Supreme Court, which has occasionally had to rule on these issues, has often done so mechanically. How then can we determine the location of the golden mean? Only through public discussion that is serious and open to all. Only by listening to one another and being willing to understand the value of creating a synthesis between these two values, and acknowledging the need to sometimes compromise. Only then will it be possible for the unique and valuable combination – a Jewish and democratic state – to thrive.
Nevertheless, critics of religionization talk about it as if it is a demon uniquely threatening Israel’s culture and society. This is the easy way out for politicians, activists, members of the media and the academy. When there is a common enemy that is as threatening as the religious demon it is much easier to close ranks, hiding together behind the issue.
Yet demonizing religion comes with a price. And the price is high. The price is the suppression of all public debate on this and related issues. The price is the stifling of every serious attempt to address in an open and comprehensive manner the topic of religion and state, and the relationship between Judaism and democracy. Fear-mongering over the religious demon leads to exaggerated, hysterical descriptions that occur whenever an attempt is made to add a Jewish dimension to the Israeli public sphere, or to promote the expression of Jewish spiritual treasures not only inside of synagogues but within Israeli life itself.
The hysteria over this issue is dragging us straight to the bottom. Instead of dialogue, we are being subjected to a cacophony of screaming from all sides. This demon must be put back in the closet, which should then be buried deep in the ground. In place of this demon, the public sphere will be filled with serious and meaningful dialogue on the Jewish and democratic values of Israel.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)